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No one to blame for Rob Ford but ourselves

Everything we know about Rob Ford — his violence, lying, racial attitudes, drunken stupors — was extensively reported before he became mayor.

Mayor Rob Ford delivers a speech at Casa Loma in Toronto on Nov. 21, 2013. John Barber says everything we now know about Ford was extensively reported before he became mayor. (David Cooper / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By John Barber

Sat., Nov. 23, 2013

A newspaper column I wrote five years ago recently enjoyed a brief second life on the Internet thanks to its protagonist, Rob Ford. Not Mayor Rob Ford, but the inexcusable buffoon who preceded him, Councillor Rob Ford.

The headline read, “It’s so awful you can’t look away.” The news at that time was his arrest for domestic assault, but even then there was a long chronicle of hideous misbehaviour to flesh out the bottom of the story.

Twitterers hailed the column as “prescient,” although in truth neither I nor any other bike-riding pinko could ever have predicted the day when this fool would lead Toronto. Mayor Mel Lastman had established a baseline below which it was surely impossible to descend. I would have been less surprised to see E.T. snuggled in my pannier than Rob Ford become mayor. Prescience is bunk.

What’s striking about looking back is the fact that everything we now know about the man — his violence, his lying, his racial attitudes, his drunken stupors, his endless shirking, his rank stupidity — was well established and extensively reported before his unlikely ascension. What’s chilling is the fact that so many people voted for him anyway.

I particularly remember what Ford’s executive assistant said when I phoned seeking comment about his boss’s alleged ejection from the Air Canada Centre in 2006. A couple from Oshawa had written to journalists complaining that an unruly drunk had ruined their night at the hockey game by berating and abusing them, telling the wife “to go over to Iran and get raped and shot,” and that before being led away by security he gave them a business card: Councillor Rob Ford.

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“Could it be true?” I asked the aide.

“Sounds like buddy,” he replied.

Ford, of course, lied when confronted personally. He lied aggressively, saying he was never at the game. He feigned the highest outrage, accusing the poor schoolteacher whom he had abused of being a political enemy orchestrating a baseless smear campaign. Blah blah blah.

And then, when confronted with irrefutable facts — the business card! — he muttered “sorry” in his quietest little boy voice while wheeling to re-aim more blundering abuse at other easy targets. Like his wife.

We heard all about it — all of it.

Toronto made no “innocent mistake” electing this man to its highest civic office. No one who voted for Ford in 2010 can credibly claim to be surprised by what has happened since. To the extent they were misled, they let it happen with eyes wide shut.

Historian Barbara Tuchman described the crucial distinction between innocent mistakes and inexcusable stupidity in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, a book that examines why nations throughout history have so consistently pursued policies that directly attack their own self-interest. Error occurs in the absence of necessary information. But folly, Tuchman writes, occurs in the face of explicit warnings based on clear facts close at hand: “It must have been perceived as counterproductive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.”

In the liberal fantasy world where too many of us seem to be dwelling, Torontonians would learn from the Ford rampage and exercise their franchise more responsibly in the future. But in the very real world that Rob Ford and his brother have made, with the considerable aid of more than 300,000 unrecallable votes, such hopes can only seem naive. The unballasted politics of the multicultural megacity is an open invitation to demagoguery. Now it has arrived. It’s the new normal.

And the true humiliation is that Rob Ford really is one of us. He is Toronto’s shame, and richly deserved it is.

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